Aboriginal communities, school districts, and SFU in partnership
For Mark Fettes, his first doctoral course in education was "like
a homecoming." With two and a half degrees in biochemistry, that
sounds like an odd statement. But Fettes had decided not to be a
lab scientist, quit his PhD program, gone to work for an NGO in
Europe (where his work language was Esperanto and he also learned
Dutch), and returned to Canada to work for the Assembly of First
Nations researching community-based language problems in aboriginal
communities.
"In that first course I immediately began to find answers to questions
on learning and language that had been nagging me for years," says
Fettes, now an expert on linguistic ecology in the faculty of education.
He studies how language and culture influence the way people imagine
and how imagination is implicated in learning, relationship building,
and community identification, and he continues to find answers to
those nagging questions.
A $1 million five-year grant to Fettes from the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council's Community-University Research
Alliances (CURA) will help. The grant will allow Fettes and his
team to work with the Sto:lo, Haida, and Tsimshian communities and
with school districts in Chilliwack, the Queen Charlotte Islands,
and Prince Rupert to see how the concepts of imaginative learning
developed at SFU can help schools engage all children in learning.
Only 42 percent of 18-year-old B.C. aboriginal students complete
high school compared to 79 percent of other students. Fettes wants
to address that problem.
The concepts of imaginative learning are at the heart of work done
by education professor Kieran Egan and his Imaginative Education
Research Group, of which Fettes is a member. The theory says that
students will learn best when teaching strategies and subject matter
appeal to imagination rather than to memory. It presents new ways
of thinking about children and about how they make sense of the
world around them, and develops school curriculum based on that
new thinking.
Children from each culture look at the world differently and need
to be addressed differently if they are to benefit from school.
Conventional learning strategies often don't work in aboriginal
settings because those strategies are based on assumptions about
students' identities within the dominant culture.
"It is difficult to adopt a way of imagining the world in which
you are invisible or marginalized, yet this is what the mainstream
curriculum typically requires of students," explains Fettes. "Through
imaginative education, we hope to involve learners in re-imagining
their communities' futures and their place in the world.
"Through imaginative education, we hope
to inolve learners in re-imagining their communities' futures
and their place in the world."
"First Nations kids already have cultural tools for thinking about
the world, but those are not the tools that will help them with
a school curriculum because the curriculum has been developed for
middle-class kids," says Fettes. "To change that, it is going to
be necessary for teachers to take some risks."
Here is where the CURA project comes in SFU will provide the
frameworks and techniques to help teachers take the risks that will
lead to innovative and imaginative teaching. In each of the three
school districts the SFU team will work with experienced teachers
who have a background in First Nations teaching and with community
leaders. Each of the experienced teachers will spend 40 percent
of their time as project leaders, working to get six to eight teachers
per school district to participate. Those involved teach from grades
four to seven because that is when aboriginal students often start
to have difficulty as they move from an oral to a literate way of
understanding.
Participating teachers will be asked to read and think and talk
and look at different ways of doing things to find a sense of
wonder and adventure. They will be asked to "lay the curriculum
bare to see what the underlying human passions are" to "look at
the fears, hopes, and struggles that all kids can, in principle,
connect with." And they will be asked to open up a space for imaginative
engagement.
"One of the things we are trying to do is build a learning community
for teachers with the help of a university setting and outside (First
Nations) influences so teachers feel continually inspired to think
imaginatively and take risks," says Fettes. "A lot of what goes
on in classrooms now comes from a fear of taking risks. We hope
through what we are developing that teachers will feel supported
to take those risks. "Kieran Egan's work offers guidelines and support
so that risk-taking works for teachers. There are things you can
try that we know will result in the kind of educational engagement
we are looking for," Fettes continues. "There is a great need for
this sort of teaching, particularly with First Nations students."
As the project proceeds, Fettes and his researchers want to look
at what engages kids at different ages, at different levels of intellectual
development, and from different cultures. At the same time, they
will look at the participating teachers and determine what gives
them new insights, what engages the kids in their common space,
and how to make educational change sustainable. The project has
been structured so that after five years there will be a critical
mass of teachers using the same approach so the project will be
self-fuelling.
Fettes praises the good relationship the university has with various
communities. "We really couldn't do it the way we envision it without
a lot of trust already established with the schools districts and
the First Nations." And he's excited about the opportunity to use
his background as a linguist and educator to help First Nations
children. "I don't know of anybody who has used these teaching strategies
and concepts in classrooms where more than half the students are
aboriginal," he concludes. aq
A teacher faces a grade six class. She holds up a box. “What’s
inside?” she asks. Various students reply, “Nothing,”
“It’s empty,” “Dust.” “Ah, but it’s
not empty,” she says. “It’s full of air.” But
to the students air doesn’t seem very interesting until she
starts to get them developing ideas about what air is made up of.
“Air is full of invisible particles that have been around forever,
so we are breathing dinosaur breath,” the teacher says. “Air
is full of dust, and dust is mainly small flakes from humans, so
we are breathing Andrew, and Emma, and Lizzie. And by the way, where
do insects go to the bathroom?” Suddenly the students are engaged;
suddenly air is something, not nothing.
By the end of the teaching unit on air the kids are acting as particles
of air, they are working on art about air, they’re dancing
as air. Forever after, when these kids think about air, there will
be an emotional spark. And they’ll remember lots about air.
aq
